Open Wide

By Kirk Wareham

A short history of dental angst

The field of dentistry is something of a wide bleak desert, covered with cacti, scrub brush, and stones, with only an occasional burst of color and flower.

The truth be told, I have been treated by many excellent dentists; they are a hardy and determined lot, and the vast majority are good women and men who treat their clients with compassion, an admirable trait, to be sure.

When my brothers and I were still innocent schoolboys, Mother taught us to brush our teeth after eating. She claimed it was a better plan than going around toothless in our teens, eating applesauce and yogurt, and smiling with compressed lips.

Surprisingly, it made sense, even to us, so we complied, when we remembered. But deeper discussions of dental care caused us to shuffle our feet and glance warily over our shoulders, for unspoken hazards seemed to lurk nearby.

Wow, times sure have changed when it comes to polishing the old tusks!

Back in the day, when Pterodactyls swooped silently over the rim of the world, and cave dwellers painted political slogans high on the walls of their caves, woe betide Mr. Neanderthal if one of his teeth went belly-up.

The first thing he did then was to go hunting for a dinosaur with a spare tendon. He would tie one end around his whimpering molar, and his neighbor (two caves down, and take the first left) would tie the other end around a boulder half the size of Spinosaurus, and then . . . heave ho! . . . over the cliff we go! On a lucky day, the man did not end up at the bottom of the cliff along with his tooth.

Dentistry became vastly more civilized in the Middle Ages. If a toothache developed, there was only one known recourse; pull the darn thing out! So the man would suffer quietly for as long as he could hold out, and after that, he would let the entire free world know about it at the top of his lungs. When the throbbing in his brain drove him to run in circles and bang his head against blunt objects, he knew it was time to visit the dentist, sometimes known as the local blacksmith.

When the blacksmith saw a man approaching, holding his hand over his jaw, a cheerful smile would drift over his countenance, he would lick his lips, and beckon with a massive sooty index finger.

“Follow me, my friend, I can fix your kind, that I can, by golly.”

The two of them would stroll out to the shop where the fire hung low and needed reviving with leather bellows. Then the smithy would grapple at the yelping tooth with one of those hideous tongs designed to remove molten chunks of steel from fiery furnaces.

When the smithy had finished his work, when the tooth was good and gone, the victim went looking for a medicine man to clean up the flesh wounds.

A tour of dental offices these days reveals a frightening array of tools: blunt probes, spoon excavators, syringes, drills, an amalgam well (sounds scary), burnishers, something called a Willis gauge (I wonder what happened to poor Willis?), Howe pliers (him too?), air tips, water tips, articulating paper holders, mouth props (they feel like half a brick is stuck in your throat), retractors, scissors, spatula, scalers, explorers, and mirrors. When these implements are spread out on a tray by the chair, it is a truly horrifying sight.

From my perspective, Novocain is the greatest invention in the long-checkered history of humankind. I mean, who can forget those glorious pre-Novocainian days when we wallowed in our suffering while the high-pitched resonance of a sprightly drill flooded our brain?

With the availability of Novocain, the person on the wrong end of the drill can occasionally uncurl his legs from around the armrests of the chair. What would we do without good old Novocain?

Novocain also makes life easier for the dentist because it eliminates the need to hire muscle-bound bruisers to put you into a headlock and sit on you. It also reduces the cost of towels to wipe up the sweat, and headphones to drown out the screaming.

By the time I entered high school, the dental industry had grown and matured and developed a new and startling strategy; they filled all the teeth ahead of time so there was no opportunity for them to rot. Laugh if you will, but I speak from personal experience.

True story: in one dubious appointment, my dentist filled eight of my teeth. I think it was the entire middle section of the bottom row, but I could be wrong. He and his accomplices came at me with all the heavy road equipment they could find in the office: jackhammers, power drills, road graders, rock crushers . . . my mouth was so full of rubble that I could not even swear properly.

It was so much fun that we did it again the next week. Working prodigiously, he managed to fill nine more teeth before the next victim arrived; I think it was the top row this time, and the invoice arrived in the mail at the end of the month.

For years afterward, I cringed every time someone leaned across me and blocked out the light.

For hundreds of years, people used twigs, toothpicks, and water to clean their teeth. Then came toothbrushes and toothpaste, once a day. Then twice a day. Then flossing once a day as well. Then twice a day. Then came coated floss, waxed floss, stretchy floss, gluten-free floss, multi-floral floss, and more flavors of floss than you can find in the potato chip aisle at Stewart’s convenience shop.

You’ve heard of oral hygiene, right? Well, I have oral depression . . . a gaping hole between two of my teeth. One day I heard a loud snap! and one of my front incisors cracked from top to bottom.

Several dentists were unanimous in their prognosis: can’t save her, out she comes! They sent me upstate to a fellow who specializes in this extraction stuff.

It was obvious, as soon as I walked in, that he couldn’t wait to get his hands on me.

“Open wide,” he said, and with no further preliminaries or warning, he thrust a massive needle into the roof of my mouth. By the time I had untangled my feet from the water pipes on the ceiling, he did it again. In my experience, roof-of-mouth piercing is a very effective form of torture.

Once the Novocain took effect, the surgeon began the work at hand, splitting the tooth into sections and hauling them out, one by one. He sewed me up and sent me wobbling onto the street, where I was genuinely surprised to find that the sun was still shining.

When I arrived home and smiled at my wife, she scowled and said I looked like a close relative of Carlsbad Caverns.

A week later, the extraction site became infected, and it was necessary to drive upstate once again. This was late on a Friday afternoon, time for working folk to be punching out of work, picking up the check, and heading for a comfortable spot in The Lost Saloon.

Dentists also need time off, but here was this surgeon, stuck in the office because of me. I could see the gleam in his eye: this guy has some nerve to return at this hour?

He didn’t waste any time. He jerked my mouth open and plunged that horse needle into the roof of my mouth, missing the previous scars. Digging around with the excavator and various other sharp implements, he found a leftover piece of bone, pulled it out fiercely, as if I was to blame, and pushed me out of the chair.

To this day I find trips to the dentist daunting and intimidating. I go warily, nerves steeled, and if possible, I bring along a life jacket. It doesn’t keep me afloat, but it sure is a handy object to scream into.

Outside of the office, I have never met a dentist who was not pleasant and congenial. So when he is finished clambering around among the boulders in your mouth, overcome your dental angst and thank him warmly for his labors.